such that silence thickens around what I’m afraid to say
so soon impenetrable
three burly men walk ahead of me on the sidewalk
make a similarly unassailable wall
I tell myself I need a more finely-calibrated scale of value
the ‘telling’ disrupts further my scale’s accuracy as such
seemingly weightless realizations are easily ignored
the hawk floating on air currents
needs both feather and muscle
to achieve a height above observable clouds
such that the cat I walk past in the yard
is camouflaged by its stillness
as I pass but then I see a lizard
that failed invisibility
in the cat’s mouth
the book falls from its place on my shelf as such
it opens to a cameo detail from Bosch’s Garden of Delights
a holy figure peers off the page
is virtue applied by the painter or revealed
this is the morning I’ll chew through clouds
such that I close my left eye to focus
imprisoning myself in the iris of my right
a songbird’s trill makes me glance toward my closed window
ripples in its decades-old glass stop moving just as I look
I yawn with the hope of opening more orifices
in Bosch’s detail a bird’s beak narrows to infinity as such
its breast-feathers privately shine
the figurines my mother kept in a curio cabinet
wore easily classified expressions
of vision painted shut
